ngs and fashions which have utterly vanished, no
one will be disposed, I imagine, to deny. Butler's 'Hudibras,' for
instance, which was the delight of a gay and witty society, is to me at
least not unfrequently dull. Of some works, no doubt, which made a noise
in their day it seems impossible to detect the slightest race of charm.
But this is not the case with 'Hudibras.' Its merits are obvious. That
they should have appealed to a generation sick of the reign of the
"Saints" is precisely what we should have expected. But to us, who are
not sick of the reign of the Saints, they appeal but imperfectly. The
attempt to reproduce artificially the frame of mind of those who first
read the poem is not only an effort, but is to most people, at all
events, an unsuccessful effort. What is true of 'Hudibras' is true also,
though in an inconceivably smaller degree, of those great works of
imagination which deal with the elemental facts of human character and
human passion. Yet even on these, time does, though lightly, lay his
hand. Wherever what may be called "historic sympathy" is required, there
will be some diminution of the enjoyment which those must have felt who
were the poet's contemporaries. We look, so to speak, at the same
splendid landscape as they, but distance has made it necessary for us to
aid our natural vision with glasses, and some loss of light will thus
inevitably be produced, and some inconvenience from the difficulty of
truly adjusting the focus. Of all authors, Homer would, I suppose, be
thought to suffer least from such drawbacks. But yet in order to listen
to Homer's accents with the ears of an ancient Greek, we must be able,
among other things, to enter into a view about the gods which is as far
removed from what we should describe as religious sentiment, as it is
from the frigid ingenuity of those later poets who regarded the deities
of Greek mythology as so many wheels in the supernatural machinery with
which it pleased them to carry on the action of their pieces. If we are
to accept Mr. Herbert Spencer's views as to the progress of our species,
changes of sentiment are likely to occur which will even more seriously
interfere with the world's delight in the Homeric poems. When human
beings become so nicely "adjusted to their environment" that courage and
dexterity in battle will have become as useless among civic virtues as
an old helmet is among the weapons of war; when fighting gets to be
looked upon wit